Workshop API Yandex.Maps

Hooray! We ( piumosso and prophet ) attended a Yandex.kart seminar. And although it has been almost two weeks, we decided to write about what we remembered and liked. Moreover, recently the network posted all the videos of lectures from the seminar . The developers meeting was held in the “old” office of Yandex on the Scooter in a very cozy atmosphere, for which many thanks to the organizers. The audience was of two kinds - in fact, the developers, as well as project managers. The reports themselves were also part technical, and part informational. A large number of questions were asked and many of them received answers.

API Perspectives

... or what awaits us in the new year:
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Branch 1.1

• improved KML support (when the YMapsML format was created, KML wore the stigma of propriety, but now that it has become an open standard, Yandex will pay attention to it), GPX support
• modularity support for new features (unfortunately, at this stage, not at the kernel level, but at the level of new additional modules. This means that the kernel will retain its 88-kilobyte code, even if you don’t need, say, polygons);
• module "subway" (search for the nearest metro station);
• the “Hotspots” module (the ability to show a lot of objects on the map by rendering them on the map).

All these utilities will see the light in the first place, but Yandex does not name the dates by tradition. Then we are all waiting for a fairly serious API upgrade, due to the loss of backward compatibility (this will be the 1.2 branch). This is done in order to correct the mistakes made, to alter the architecture of the component parts of the API, in order to increase speed and reduce the amount of code. In principle, almost the same goals are pursued by Google (their version of the new API v3 cards was released in May), there is more emphasis on the mobile version.

Branch 1.2

• API unification, where it is not uniform;
• GeoObject + Geometry instead of Placemark and Polygon (In this pair, Geometry will be responsible for all the logic associated with the coordinates);
• MultiGeometry (correspondence of several geometries to one object);
• reduction in the size of the core due to total modularity;
• increased convenience of working with events;
• improved debugging convenience.

And also Tiler is a program for automatically cutting images into tiles to create your own "maps" using the API. Already managed to get out while we wrote this post :)

What not to expect in the near future

Unfortunately (or fortunately), in the near future we did not name either the API for traffic information, the panorama API, the creation of Bird's Eye snapshots, or the Flash API for maps. It is possible that someday all this may appear.

The guests

The map developers invited their fellow API users to share their successes, problems, and thoughts about implementing Yandex.Maps on their websites. It was especially interesting to listen to the creator of maplos.com - the original mashup of Yandex maps and Google search. He is curious that he does not store the geographical coordinates of objects on the server, but receives them from the output of Google, creating a series of queries based on <user request> + <street name> and displaying the results on the map using a geocoder. While working only for Kiev.

Answers on questions

The developers were very happy to answer all the questions they asked and did not ignore the banal, but relevant question that we left when registering: “Why is Yandex map, and not Google Maps?”

Here is the content of the slide, which fully covers this topic:

• smaller amount of loadable code
• higher card loading speed
• high quality of documentation
• street names
• traffic registration,
• Yandex.Map Club (very responsive community).

The author of the mpetrunin slide, the author of the wonderful service taxovik.ru , who was also among the speakers.

For us, as well as for many, the availability of maps for various cities of Russia is decisive, which, no matter how cool Google has, and the power of its API is inapplicable in many cases. Wait for the appearance of Yandex.Maps in our new and old projects :)

Management and legal issues card issues

The legal position on copyright and key issues was voiced. The key is a sign that the user has accepted the terms of the license agreement. According to which, card providers “delegate” their rights to Yandex, so its copyright does not mean at all that the cards belong to it, and thus the whole diversity of data sources is leveled.

Cards come from a variety of “good” and not very providers. The format is ArcGIS and MapINFO .
Work with materials is reduced to the unification of data and control over their compliance with the requirements, indexing, drawing (and design) of vector objects. Yandex believes that there is where to move in terms of improving the appearance of the rendered renders.
The relationship between Yandex and suppliers is not one-sided: the company is also an intermediary for the bug report. It sends to suppliers the errors found by users and even controls their elimination. This behavior is due to the fact that according to the license agreement Yandex cannot make its own adjustments to vector maps.
A separate song is satellite imagery, when working with which there are problems with the curvature of geo-referenced objects and physical coordinates (since vector maps are not always accurate and relevant).

Bonus

The main API user is Yandex itself! From the developers have learned a few nuances that are worth paying attention to. First of all, naturally, a lot of time was spent on client optimization, the most effective method of which was splitting the download into preloading, which includes loading the main (basic) functionality and initializing it, which hangs the browser, but not much, and postloading additional modules, additional layers. Manipulations of services and layers work independently. Since the complexity of maps.yandex.ru is quite large, an architectural scheme of a common controller was organized. It lies in the fact that the main modules (search form, point click, route list, map, routes) are interconnected with each other not directly, but through a common controller that monitors various events and releases modules from this routine.

For some, it can be a discovery, but the Yandex Maps API contains a full-fledged jQuery 1.3.2, a little patched though. For projects that are based on API cards, you can save a couple of tens of kilobytes without loading the js library once again.

Conclusion

I liked very much that the developers of Yandex Maps willingly communicated with the public, the format of the reports was not severely limited in time, and those who wished could stay and talk with Yandex personally. Again, the useful and interesting information at the seminar was in abundance, we advise you to watch the video.

View seminar photo gallery
Video lectures from the seminar